showin' in your face (that your heart has found a place)
by TheJGatsby
Summary: "Scavenger," he says, trying to make it sound less like an insult and more like a revelation, wishing he knew her damn name, "you've bewitched me, body and soul." Kylo's first attempt at a love confession may be a resounding failure, but he's not one to give up easily. (Post-canon, redemption au)


Prompt: I would of course deeply enjoy some Matt x Rey, but also a big emo Kylo declaration of love or a nicely lit lightsaber battle, please and thank you.  
A Valentine's prompt fill for breakfastatharrywinston on tumblr..  
Notes: (rubs hands together) one big emo declaration of love coming up. something important you should know about me is that i am enormous pride and prejudice ho, and i'm shamelessly ripping off the 05 movie here, and you could not pay me to be sorry about it.  
Title from You've Got a New Light Shining in Your Eyes by Johnny Cash

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The air thrums with anticipation as they face each other in the pelting rain, and she ignites her saberstaff, glaring at him, strong-shouldered and resolute. He clenches his fist around his own unignited hilt, and he can see the tension in her stance increase, her face tightening, and then he throws it away from them both. The saber hilt spins through the air and lands with a splash in a distant mud puddle.

"I don't want to fight you."

He can see her thumb hovering over the ignition on her saber for a moment, bewildered conflict in her eyes, and then she lunges, slicing through the air towards him.

In the drawn-out split second her saber is coming towards him, his breath leaves him and his hand twitches with the instinct to summon his saber and defend himself, but he steels himself and doesn't move. The blade stops inches from his face, plasma sizzling slightly in the rain, and he releases a heavy sigh of relief.

"Your control is impressive," he says, trying to keep his voice steady.

"Get your lightsaber and _fight me_ ," she growls.

"I won't."

The searing heat disappears as she extinguishes her saber, but her posture is still rigid and mistrustful. "What's your angle? What do you want?"

Her hair is plastered to her face and she's squinting at him through the sting of the rain and his jaw works for a moment, at a loss for words. "I'm in agony," he says, finally, watching her carefully. "I can't get you out of my mind- every day, your voice in my head, your thoughts in the back of my brain. I can't sleep without seeing through your eyes in my dreams. And it's destroying me, I don't- I can't stop _thinking_ about you, I can't stop reaching out just to… to be near you, just for a moment." She's wide-eyed and unmoving, and he knows he probably looks pathetic, so desperate and agonized, but he can't help it. "Scavenger," he says, trying to make it sound less like an insult and more like a revelation, wishing he knew her damn name, "you've _bewitched_ me, body and soul."

"What are you saying?" she asks, suspicious and confused.

"I love you," he replies simply. "You, a… a _scavenger_ , a _Jedi_ , my enemy. And I've tried to- to resist it, to make it stop, because it's irrational and ridiculous and unreasonable, but I _can't_. In spite of everything, all the reasons I shouldn't, all the things making it impossible, I... I love y-" He's cut off, abruptly, by her fist connecting with his face.

" _Love_ ," she snarls, practically spitting on him, "does not mean maiming my friends and killing the people I care about. You have no idea what it means to love someone!" She can feel the sick darkness of anger rising in her chest, and she doesn't care. "And you don't just- tell someone you love them and then _insult_ them! It's cruel and _rude_ , on top of the fact that you're a murderer and a torturer and a thousand other terrible things!" She's practically shaking with offended rage now, and he's ready to take her lightsaber and plunge it through his chest himself. "How _dare_ you act as if I'm beneath you, after all you've done? You're a _monster_ and I want nothing to do with you!" She holds out her hand and he feels the Force thrum with her energy, with that staggering power that never fails to awe and humble him. She's so _strong_ and he's absolutely in rapture of her. His saber flies into her hand, effortlessly, like Anakin's did on Starkiller when he got his first glimpse of her monumental capability. "Now fight me," she says, holding it out to him. "Or leave."

He takes the saber from her, feeling small and disgusting in her steely, hateful hazel gaze. "I don't want to fight you," he repeats hoarsely, and for a moment he considers throwing himself at her feet and repenting, forsaking everything he is and all he's ever done just to get her to stop looking at him like he's something grotesque, but he still has his pride, wounded as it may be, so he turns and walks away from her into the pouring rain.

A month or so after the encounter in the rain, the stormtroopers start showing up. Well, at first they don't realize they're stormtroopers, because they just seem like a couple dozen incredibly skittish people with blasters, which sets off all _kinds_ of alarms in the Resistance fighters' heads, but then Finn is there and one of them gasps and points him out and starts jostling the others, and it gets sorted out pretty quickly after that.

They won't explain how they got away, only saying that the person who helped them wanted to stay secret, and they were only the first, that there'd be more. The Resistance at large is at first suspicious, but after they've proven that they have no lingering loyalties to the First Order, it's not long till they're accepted into the ranks. Then the second group comes, just as nervous and wary as the first, but immediately assuaged by the delighted greetings of their former comrades.

And so it goes- every few weeks, a new group of stormtroopers, sometimes as few as two or three, sometimes as many as thirty. Every time, they stay relatively silent on how they got away, only saying that it's a secret and they're grateful. Rey and Finn and Poe, who've sort of fallen into a position of responsibility as the commanders of this ragtag group of defectors, manage to piece together bits of the story from things they overhear or are told by the troops. Whoever's helping them is powerful, high-ranking within the Order. They all keep strictly mum on exactly who it is, though, with the sort of unwavering silence that stems from either grateful, life-owed loyalty or complete terror- Rey thinks it varies from person to person as to which one.

Whatever the case may be, they aren't looking a gift bantha in the mouth- they have an influx of new, trained, loyal soldiers, many of whom have valuable intelligence on the First Order, who look at Finn like their messiah and treat the General with reverence. Stormtroopers are the perfect soldiers, no matter what side they're on, especially when the side they're on makes tentative promises about trying to find out about their surviving families after the war is over. Hope is a powerful thing- much stronger than the fear and resignation that had kept them in the First Order's thrall.

Then it gets… weird. One day a harried band of five ex-stormtroopers limp in on a shuttle that looks like it shouldn't have rightly survived entering the atmosphere, much less the flight from wherever they'd been before, and when they disembark they have propped up between two of them a tall, slumped-over figure in tattered black robes, dripping blood.

For the first time in months, the stormtrooper escapees are greeted with raised blasters and suspicion. "Please," one of them says, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. "We're not here to fight, we just need to get him to a medbay. He's been shot."

"We can see that," Poe, the highest-ranking officer present, says, motioning to one of the other resistance fighters. "Restrain him and get him to the medbay and keep three guards on him. And go find Rey." In the flurry of activity after that, the stormtroopers are almost forgotten, but once Poe turns back around, he finds them standing in a line looking grim, and he smiles at them. "Cheer up," he says. "You're here. You're free. It's gonna be fine."

The five of them share a confused look. "We're… not prisoners?" one asks, hesitant.

Poe's baffled. "What? No! Why would you be prisoners?"

"You just restrained Kylo Ren and sent him off with three guards," says another, his confusion undertoned with something almost accusatory.

"Yeah, but he's- he's _your_ prisoner, right? You brought him here to face justice. He's… you know, he's the enemy." Poe looks between their five bewildered faces, understanding nothing.

"I don't understand the Resistance," one of them mutters.

Poe's jaw works for a moment. "Stay here," he says, walking a ways away to comm Finn.

It takes a good twenty minutes to get all the confusion sorted out, with the interruption of an angry, flustered comm from Rey in the medbay demanding to know why the _hell_ Kylo Ren is there, and by the end of it they understand everything that happened but they're even more flabbergasted than they were to begin with, because these stormtroopers are insisting that _Kylo Ren_ is the powerful person who's been helping them all escape.

It's the most ridiculous fucking thing Finn has ever heard in his life, and he's in regular contact with the last two Jedi in the galaxy and all their weird cryptic Force garbage. He's vocal about this. Poe just seems quietly incredulous. "I mean," he says, "anything's possible, right?"

"But this is just… come _on_ , Poe, it's Kylo Ren, he almost killed me for being a traitor and now he's helping stormtroopers defect? Something's… I don't know, something about this doesn't sit right with me."

They arrive at the medbay to find a furious Rey glaring at them in the hall. "Explain this," she growls, arms crossed, formidable.

"You're not going to believe us when we do," says Finn, sounding weary.

"Try me."

Poe takes a deep breath and begins. "According to the five that just got here, he's the high-ranking officer who's been helping them all escape. That's how he got shot, he was trying to get them out and they got caught."

Rey is silent for a long moment, her jaw working, thoughtful. "We need to talk to the General," she says finally. "She has to decide what we're going to do with him when he wakes up."

As if summoned, Leia comes through the door before Rey even finishes her sentence. The three of them turn to her with respectful nods, watching her face carefully.

"Where is my son?" she asks, and to the casual observer she would seem as calculatedly even-toned as usual, but Rey can feel her anguish and hope and trepidation in the Force, and Poe has spent enough time with the General to know the anxious glint to her eye, so they lead her to the room where med-droids are still working on Kylo Ren. When she sees her son, she can't help the pained, surprised gasp that falls from her lips, and none of them can blame her. He's pale and drawn on the table, the pink of his facial scar standing out starkly against paper-white skin, and there's about a half-dozen blaster wounds scattered across his body. "He's… he looks so much like Han," Leia breathes, and it hits the three of them with the same sickening lurch that they have no idea how long it's been since she's seen her son's face.

For the first time since Starkiller, Rey feels a pang of guilt for mauling him, if only because Leia will never know, now, what he looks like whole and unmarred.

"He's going to be all right," says Poe, laying a gentle hand on the General's shoulder, and she reaches up and rests hers on top of his, grateful.

"How did he get here?" Leia asks.

"The stormtroopers are saying that he's the one who's been helping them defect," Finn says, hesitant, still unsure of the truth of it but not sure what Leia will want to hear.

"But why?" she wonders aloud, just as puzzled as the rest of them.

"We don't know either, we were planning to ask him. When he wakes up." The General nods gravely.

"The three of you are dismissed," she says, seeming less like a mother and more like a military leader with her shoulders straight and her hands clasped behind her. Finn and Poe turn to leave, but Rey doesn't move.

"I'll stay with the General," she says, eyes fixed firmly on the floor. The two men leave, and then it's just Rey and Leia, off to the side in the medbay, watching the droids save Kylo Ren's life. "Do you believe it?" Rey asks, after a long silence. "That he's helping?"

"I'd like to hope it's true," Leia says, with an emotion in her voice that Rey struggles to name, then finally gives up. It's something too intricately maternal for the orphan to really understand.

"What will happen to him, when he wakes up?"

"I suppose we'll have to put him on trial."

"You don't want to, though."

Leia looks over at Rey, then back at the table. "What mother wants to see her son a war criminal, much less be the one trying him? Believe me, Rey, if I could make an exception for him, I would. As it stands his best hope is for what the stormtroopers are saying to be true. If he's really turned on the First Order, on Snoke, and he's willing to aid the Resistance, that will go a long way towards lightening his sentence. Exile, maybe, or permanent probation if he's incredibly fortunate."

Rey lets that hang in the air for a while, before she brings up the truth that's been lurking on the edge of her heart for months and is now sitting heavy on her chest as she watches the med-droids stitch him back together. "The last time I saw him," she begins, tentative, "he wouldn't fight me." Leia looks at her, a question on her face, but before she can say it, Rey blurts out, "He said he loved me. Loves me. I don't know. I punched him and told him to leave." Leia snorts, and then she's laughing. Rey feels heat creep up her neck until her face is aflame with embarrassment. "It's not funny!" she grumbles.

"If you'd known Han during the last war," Leia says, patting Rey on the arm, "you'd be laughing too."

Rey grimaces and fiddles with the end of her sleeve. "Don't… don't say anything about it to anyone, please. I haven't told anyone else and it's… weird. And complicated."

"You don't think he was lying." It's not a question.

"I think he's very, very misguided on what it means to love someone," Rey hedges, looking away from the General. "And that's coming from someone who grew up completely alone on a desert planet."

Leia sighs, world-weary. "He's been led astray for a long time, Rey, you have to understand that. It started before he was even old enough to talk, much less understand what was happening. I don't… I'm not sure he ever really had a chance." When she looks over at the younger woman again, there's something steely and grateful in her eyes. "But if he's betraying Snoke and refusing to fight you, it means something's definitely changed."

"I'd rather he didn't think he loved _me_ , though," Rey says, quietly. "He's… I don't want to be responsible for breaking his heart and turning him back to the dark."

"That's not on you, Rey. Saving him isn't your responsibility. You're your own person first, and I may not have seen him in fifteen years but I know I raised my son to respect that."

No matter how long she's away from Jakku and Plutt and her entire pitiful existence there, she doesn't think she'll ever get used to people valuing her like that, like she's more than just a scavenger, a tool. It's everything she ever wanted, every time someone tells her she's worth more than she thinks, and she hopes she never loses the thrill in her chest when it happens. So she smiles gratefully at Leia and says nothing more, just standing with her in silent solidarity as they watch the med-droids put Ren or Ben or whoever he is back together.

Two days later, he wakes up.

Leia's the first one at his bedside, of course, spending as much time with him as she can between all the other duties that come along with running the Resistance. The other officers are understanding, and even if they don't quite approve they still respect Leia enough to know that the fact he's her son doesn't change anything, in the macro sense. He gets no special treatment.

An hour after he wakes, Rey's comm beeps and she wriggles out from where she's wedged halfway in the engine block of an X-Wing so she can look at the message. She blanches, tension entering her shoulders, and there's a long moment where she debates whether she shouldn't just pretend she didn't get the message and go back to the easy comfort of mechanic work, but finally she sighs and replaces her tools in their box and puts it back on the shelf so she can trudge to the medbay.

Leia's standing in the hall when she gets there, her eyes red as if she's been crying, and she smiles at Rey when she sees her.

"How is he?" asks Rey, offering the General a small smile of her own.

"He's fine. He doesn't know you're here, but I thought you ought to have a chance to talk to him."

Rey doesn't know quite how to say that the last thing she wants is to talk to him, but something in Leia's face tells her that she really shouldn't, so she just nods and makes her way inside.

When he looks up and sees her, his face cycles through shock and suspicion and something akin to embarrassment before settling into a neutral mask. He shifts uncomfortably in the papery medical gown, and she finds herself thinking that he doesn't look the remotest bit like Kylo Ren while sitting in a medbay bed looking drawn and tired and entirely unintimidating. This must be Ben, she thinks, just a man, someone pale and pedestrian with bedhead and a mother who loves him.

"Is it true?" she asks, not moving from the doorway. "You're the one who helped all those stormtroopers?"

He looks away from her. "Yes." His voice is quiet and croaky with sleep, and in her mind he moves even further from the image of her dark, wicked nemesis.

"Why?"

It's a long time before he responds, his eyes roaming over the blanket in his lap as if searching for the answer. "Did you know that they're kidnapped as infants to become soldiers?" he says finally.

"Yes, Finn told us."

"Then that answers your question."

Rey scowls. "No, it doesn't, don't be cryptic," she snaps.

"It's not right," he says immediately. "Doing that to them, to anyone- it's not right. People deserve a chance. A choice."

And she remembers what Leia told her about him, about the darkness stalking him as a child, and it makes sense. "Why did it take you so long to figure that out, that it's not right?"

"I always knew it wasn't right, I always hated it. I just didn't see the point in trying to change it if I couldn't save them all. There are so _many_ , what did it matter if a hundred were free while hundreds of thousands more were still trapped?"

"What changed your mind?"

He stares at her then, puzzled. "But you… surely you know it was because of you."

She blinks in bewilderment. "Me?" she manages finally. "What do I have to do with it?" Something clicks in her mind and she tries not to recoil. "If you think this is going to make me love you-"

"No!" he protests, shaking his head. "No, I'm not _stupid_. I just- you treat the traitor, FN-2187 like he's… he has value, here, and individuality, the way he never did in the First Order, and I just thought… I don't know. I stopped seeing the stormtroopers as a unit and started seeing them as individuals and I thought even if they couldn't all… they all deserve a chance, and I thought I'd do what I could to give that chance to as many as possible." He clenches his fists in the blankets, twisting them in his long fingers. "And if I hadn't _fucked_ _up_ I could have saved even more."

"His name's Finn," Rey says, immediately, almost on reflex. "He has a name. They all do."

Kylo Ren sighs, slumping slightly. "I made the right choice, then."

"You did," she confirms thoughtfully.

Luke comms her that night, and they run the routine- how she is, how he is, how her meditation and self-training is going. It's comforting to talk to her master again, until he brings up the one thing she wants most to forget.

"So I heard from my sister that you spoke to her son today."

Rey groans. "I really, really don't want to talk about Kylo Ren, Luke. I'm sorry."

"Ben is not… an ideal person, but he's been through a lot. He's trying, and he's doing the best with what he has, even though that's not very good. You could do him a lot of good, show him how to walk on the light side again. He holds you in very high regard."

"You've spoken to him?"

"He's changed, Rey. You should learn to forgive him."

"I can't, it's impossible, you can't ask that of me."

"What purpose does it serve to keep hating him? It won't undo anything he's done."

"He killed Han Solo."

"Who ever said forgiveness was easy?"

Rey sighs heavily, knowing he's right and resenting it deeply.

She visits him again in the medbay the next day, sitting down in the chair next to his bed and waiting for him to wake up. When he does, he doesn't say anything, just watches her with something pained and wanting in his eyes until she notices he's awake.

"Can I ask you a question?" she says, fiddling with the hem of her jacket. The stitching is starting to fall out, she'll have to fix it soon.

"You just did."

Rey scowls, and she'd smack him if he was within arm's reach. "Don't be smart."

"Yes, then. Ask away."

She chews on her lip for a moment, trying to decide how to phrase it, then settles for the blunt way. "Why did you kill Han?"

He flinches at the name, and a part of her is sad for it, but another part thinks _good, he deserves it_. "I thought it would bring me over to the darkness," he says, finally. "I thought if I just- if I killed someone I loved, there was no coming back from that. And I was wrong."

"You were," she shoots back, trying to sound severe and damning and only making it to sad.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I am. It wasn't just me who loved him, and _I_ took him away, and I'm sorry."

"Tell that to your mother," Rey snaps. "It's _her_ husband you killed."

"I have. A dozen times."

"Say it a million more and maybe then you'll start to deserve how much she still cares about you." Rey knows she's being cruel, and it feels gratifying, almost good in an uncomfortable way, after everything he's done, but terrible all the same because she knows she should be _better_ than this. "You destroyed your _family_."

"I know."

"Does it hurt?"

"Immensely."

"Good."

They put him on trial as soon as he can get out of bed, and after half the ex-stormtroopers testify on his behalf and he offers to tell the Resistance everything he knows about the First Order's troop movements, which is admittedly a limited amount, since he wasn't very involved with the actual military operations, they agree to put him on probation, on the condition that he doesn't leave D'Qar without a suitable escort. Leia looks like she's about to cry when they deliver the verdict.

It's odd, at first, having him there, seeing him around the base in the unremarkable spacer's garb he adopts now that the black robes are gone. Eventually Rey stops jumping every time she sees him, stops feeling the prick of fear at the sound of his voice. She gets used to him.

Seeing how the rest of the Resistance treats him doesn't bother her at first, but gradually it begins to. The former stormtroopers don't seem to like him much either, although they're more willing to be around him and have a strange sort of loyalty to him that speaks more of grateful respect than anything. But other than that, he's more or less a pariah, alone more often than not, met with dirty looks everywhere he goes.

Rey finds him alone one day on the shore of a lake near the base, staring out over the water. She sits down next to him without a word and they don't say anything for a while, but she can feel him looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Finally she breaks the silence.

"I never believed the ocean was real." It feels silly and irrelevant, but someone had to say something. He snorts. "I'm from a desert planet, okay? I couldn't imagine that much water all existing at once, much less just… sitting there. It just didn't seem possible."

"On Naboo," he says, softly, "the planet's entire core is water. There's a whole underwater civilization."

"That's incredible," she sighs, dragging her fingers through the crystalline water as it laps at the pebble beach.

"I hope you get to see it," he says, "someday."

"You're really sorry, aren't you?" She looks over at him for the first time, and when he meets her gaze he looks just as haunted as he did the first day he arrived. The scar she gave him stretches the skin of his face oddly.

"You can't imagine," he replies, hoarse, nearly inaudible.

"When Master Luke told me I should forgive you, I told him it was impossible."

Kylo laughs bitterly. "You were probably right."

"I don't think so," she says, and he looks at her like she's an impossible puzzle and he wants nothing more than to understand every enigmatic inch.

When Leia comes to her with a mission, something small and dangerous, and tells her she can take only one other person with her, her mind goes immediately to Kylo. Finn would be her first choice, normally, or Poe, but they're both tied up in an outer-rim siege. And she can't stop thinking about what he said, about people deserving a chance, and about Master Luke's insistence on forgiveness, and she feels like this is the universe testing her, so she finds herself knocking at his door as soon as Leia dismisses her.

He looks wary when he opens it, and confused when he sees her. "What can I do for you?"

"I need your help." He steps aside to let her in, and she braces herself to feel nervous about being alone with him, but it never comes. "It's a mission on Seranno, espionage stuff, dangerous and risky, et-cetera."

He looks a little bit taken aback, and after a moment he says, "Why me?"

"I really, really want everyone else to be wrong about you. They don't trust you and they think you're dangerous and unstable and I just… if a scavenger from Jakku can become the last Jedi, who's to say you can't become a good person?" She takes a deep breath. "Will you go with me or not?"

"I will," he says, earnest and unhesitant. "I won't let you down, Rey, I promise."

She tries to fight a smile. "You'd better not, I'm trusting you with my life here. Come on, we need to get ready, we can debrief on the way."

Rey's past expecting missions to be easy- that's just a surefire way to jinx it, so she assumes every mission could well be her last, no matter what it is. It's different, with Kylo- he's not as easygoing as her friends, but he doesn't get as claustrophobic and stir-crazy on the long flight as Finn does, and he doesn't get twitchy at her piloting the way Poe does, so she doesn't mind his attitude. When they land, he slips into an aura of calm, silent professionalism that's almost unsettlingly different from his usual self. Sometimes she forgets he's ten years older than her, with all the knowledge and worldliness and experience that comes from spending his life travelling the galaxy instead of being stuck on the same junkyard rock for fifteen endless years.

And he's _good_ at this- she can feel the way that he twists and manipulates the Force, aware of everything around them, and though his footsteps are usually heavy and obvious, they become almost silent when they're breaking into the fortress they're meant to infiltrate. It's not until after they've gotten in, gotten the intelligence, and are sneaking back out that things start to go sideways. They're almost in the clear when a blaster bolt catches Rey in the shoulder, grazing her and slicing open her sleeve, and she stumbles. Kylo turns around to look at her when she cries out, and his face twists into fear and then a grim determination, and she has no idea what he's looking at, but suddenly he's pulling her into him and twisting around, falling into a crouch, covering her body with his own completely and casting the Force out behind him.

Then the grenade explodes behind them, and Kylo's Force pushed it away so that they're not at the center of the blast, but not far enough, because Rey still feels the heat wash over her, hears a pained whine from Kylo. After another heartbeat, he brings himself shakily to his feet and starts running again, slower, tugging her behind him. She almost trips over herself when she sees the bloody, charred skin of his back, the largest pieces of shrapnel sticking out, and with a sudden flash of white-hot battle rage she whips around and casts out with all her strength in the Force, sending their attackers flying backwards far and hard enough that none of them rise.

When they get back to the ship, Kylo collapses almost immediately to the floor and Rey hesitates for a moment over his crumpled body before running to the pilot's seat and getting them into the air, punching the hyperdrive almost before it can be considered safe. As soon as they're in hyperspace, she practically dives for the medpack on the shelf and kneels next to where he's managed to pull himself up onto one of the bench-seats of the ship and is lying on his stomach. She can smell burned flesh and it makes her stomach churn.

"What do I do?" she asks, desperate, clutching the metal edge of the bench so hard her knuckles go white.

"You don't have any medical training?" She shakes her head and he exhales in a pained imitation of a sigh. "You should really get some as soon as we get back."

"I plan to, but what do I do right _now_?"

"Nothing. If you don't know what you're doing you could damage me worse. Are there painkillers in there?" She digs around for a moment and comes up with a tube of Nyex. "Yes, exactly, that." Grimacing, she injects it carefully into his arm, and after a few moments his eyes close. "Thank you."

With a relieved sigh, she settles into a more comfortable position and reaches out, gently tucking his sweaty hair away from his face, running her fingers through the black curls. "You saved my life," she says softly.

He cracks a drowsy grin. "Point for me. Does this mean I'm a better man than Finn yet or no?"

She blinks, bewildered. "You're a good man as you are, Kylo, what does Finn have to do with it?"

"You like him," he replies, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "I figured I should be more like him if I wanted you to like me."

"I do like you," she insists, "but I like you for _you_ , not because you're anything like Finn. Which you really aren't, honestly."

"Damn," he mumbles. "I was really trying."

Rey's heart twists with endearment and she can't help but smile weakly at him. "You're doing just fine," she reassures.

"I was wrong," he says, "when I told you I loved you before. Not about what I felt- what I still feel, but… I shouldn't have done that to you."

"It's in the past," she says, twisting a lock of his hair between her fingers.

"I still do love you," he murmurs, nearly asleep. "Even more, now. And I don't expect you to ever… I just want to be enough that you won't look at me ever again like you did that day."

"Like what?"

"Like a monster," he sighs, barely still conscious, and she feels a hot rush of shame and anger at her past self. Her judgment then was accurate, given all she knew, but it makes her head spin to try and reconcile the awful creature she'd seen him as then with the man she knows now, brave and earnest and self-sacrificing, someone who'd throw himself in front of a grenade just to protect her, and she realizes, abruptly, how much she _cares_.

"You're the furthest thing from a monster," she says, quietly, tracing her fingers along his jaw. He's sound asleep, now, his face serene, and she leans forward on impulse to brush a kiss against his temple.

It's a harrowing few hours' flight back to D'Qar, and Kylo doesn't wake up again the whole time. When his face starts to twist in pain, she digs out another dose of Nyex from the medpack, checking the instructions to make sure it's safe to give him more, and injects it, waiting with bated breath for him to return to peaceful sleep. As soon as they drop out of hyperspace, Rey's in the pilot's seat, guiding them carefully into the port, and then she's racing out of the shuttle and calling desperately for med-droids.

For the second time since he arrived in at the Resistance, Rey finds herself in the medbay watching med-droids put Kylo's bleeding body back together. Leia joins her, after a few minutes.

"You need to debrief," the General chides, but it's just a token reprimand, and Rey wouldn't care anyway. "What happened?"

"A grenade, while we were escaping," Rey replies, wrapping her arms around herself, her shoulders tense with something like guilt. "He saved my life."

Leia looks at her for a long moment, then gestures to the blaster wound on her shoulder. "You need to get that treated."

"I'm fine."

"Standing here and worrying doesn't help anything," Leia says, sounding old and wise and sympathetic, reaching out to rest a hand on the younger woman's shoulder. "Go get it looked at, he'll still be here when you're done."

Rey's there when he wakes up the next day, and he smiles blearily at her when he sees. "Fancy seeing you here," he mumbles, and where his croaky sleep-voice and messy hair had once made her uncomfortable with the revelation of his humanness, they now just make her heart twist fondly.

"You should really try to spend less time in hospital beds," she replies, grinning back.

"If it keeps you out of them, I make no promises."

Rey rolls her eyes. "See if I ever take you on a mission again- all these dramatics, the life-saving, you really don't do anything halfway, do you?"

"Does that mean I've proven myself, then?"

"Beyond a shadow of a doubt."

Things start to change after that, for both of them. Kylo finds more acceptance in the Resistance after he gets out of the medbay, partly because people hear about what he did and start to change their opinions, but mostly because the first time he wanders into the canteen after the mission, Poe spots him immediately and drags him over to sit down with him and Finn and Rey, thanking him for "looking after our girl sunshine," and Poe's favor is like law in the social hierarchy of the Resistance- if Poe is your friend, everyone is. He's fitting in. People like him, and Rey realizes one day during a casual conversation that she considers him one of her closest friends. It's strange, to her, if only because it seems completely unexceptional- of course he's her friend, why wouldn't he be? He's _Kylo_.

A few months later, Kylo disappears for a while. They find the tracker in his room, bloody like he pulled it out of his arm himself- with his pain tolerance, Rey wouldn't put it past him. And she's… hurt, and furious beyond reason, not to mention the fact that he's violated his probation and will probably be punished even worse when they find him, if they find him, which they probably won't, because they don't have the resources to spare looking for him, so they just accept it uneasily and keep fighting. The outlook is grim for them, and they're focusing all their efforts on holding up against the might of the First Order.

Then, suddenly, it's as if a switch has been flipped, and the Order retreats, and the Resistance is left to regroup in peace. A couple of days later, Kylo reappears, looking battered and tired and more than a little shell-shocked. He's greeted with blasters and this time they reluctantly lock him up for the General to deal with when she gets back.

Rey's in his cell as soon as they'll let her visit him. "Where the _hell_ were you?" she snaps at him, arms crossed, the picture of indignant betrayal.

"I killed Snoke," he replies, easy, as if it's not fucking monumental. She just gapes at him for a while.

"Why did you disappear like that?" she asks, sitting down next to him on the prison bunk.

"I had to go alone. It was too dangerous to risk anyone else's life. I wasn't even sure I'd make it back."

She leans her head on his shoulder, wrapping her arm around his. "I was worried."

He doesn't quite startle, but she can tell he's surprised. "What?"

"I didn't know where you were, what had happened- you could have been dead."

"I thought you'd be angry."

She snorts. "I was furious. But not as mad as I was worried." Rey lifts her head to look at him. "You know, if you'd _asked_ , I would have gone with-"

" _No_ ," he chokes out, eyes going immediately wild with an almost panicked fear. "No, stars, never. I couldn't- you have no idea what Snoke is capable of, what he's willing to _do_. There's no way I'd put you in that kind of danger. Ever."

Rey glares at him. "But it's fine to risk _yourself_?"

"Who cares what happens to me?" he says, flippant, as if it's obvious.

" _I_ do! _I_ care, you complete-"

"Can I kiss you?" He says it suddenly, half-breathless, like it's been sitting on the tip of his tongue his entire life, and all she can do is stare at him. After a beat of silence he starts backtracking, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't-"

Rey grabs him by the back of the neck and pulls him down into an almost fervent kiss, too fast, too unexpected, all clacking teeth and eager awkwardness, somehow perfect and dizzying in spite of itself. She pulls back after a moment, laughing slightly, and he knows he's grinning like an idiot as he tugs her into his lap and tangles his hand in her hair. "Let's try that again," he says.

Their second kiss is long and slow and unreserved, thrilling in its newness, patient like they have all the time in the world. When it ends, Rey pulls back with a sigh and presses her forehead against his, her hand tracing lazily up and down his arm. "Please don't ever leave me like that again."

"Never." When he kisses her again, she can taste the promise on his lips, sweet and sincere and full of so much love she thinks she could cry for it.

And it's so, so good.


End file.
